How to Get Out of Feeling Lonely

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The fact that people are lonely isn’t new, despite the U.S. Surgeon General proclaiming in 2023 that loneliness and isolation are a national epidemic. People have always been lonely, even when they are surrounded by people. If you are old enough, you might remember a line from the Beatles' 1966 song Eleanor Rigby: "... All the lonely people... Where do they all come from?"

You might be one of those lonely people. Or you might be struggling to understand someone you are in a relationship with. In either case, this article should help by giving you concrete ideas about what you can do.

Loneliness as a Product of Attachment Styles

Attachment styles are personality characteristics that develop in childhood and provide us with roadmaps for understanding and navigating the social world as adults. There are four basic attachment styles.

Secure. If our early family relationships were with parents who were consistently warm, available, and responsive, we probably would have developed a secure attachment style. In this case, your parents would have been emotionally perceptive and understanding of your emotional needs. If you were upset or frightened, they would have 1) accurately perceived your experience, 2) shown you in their words and facial expressions that they understood what you were experiencing, and then, after having validated your perceptions and joined you in your emotional experiences, they may have 3) attempted to comfort you or given you another way of looking at things. In this context, you would not have felt alone in your struggles. By extension, relative to those with insecure attachment styles, people with secure styles are the least likely to feel lonely in adulthood (Shorter et al., 2022).

Avoidant/Dismissing. If your parents took the approach that children should not be coddled, they may have let you face your struggles alone. They probably would not have perceived your experience accurately or recognized when you were hurt or upset. By extension, they would not have reflected your experience in their words or in their facial expressions. You would have been alone with your emotions and would not have known what to do with them. Instead of learning to sit with your difficult feelings, you would have buried them away, refused to look at them, and denied to yourself and others that anything was wrong. As an adult, you would continue to repress your lonely feelings. But underneath the facade you would still have a deeper sense of being alone.

Anxious/Preoccupied. If your parents were inconsistent, sometimes warm and accepting, sometimes cold or rejecting, you may have learned to distrust whether people would be there for you when you needed them. Your parents will have supported and validated you often enough that you would always keep reaching out for them and trying, but it would expose you to continuing to be periodically misread and invalidated. You will have kept trying anyway, continued to have strong emotions, and stayed vigilant for threat cues and signs of rejection. So, if you felt lonely in childhood, you may have felt it intensely and repeatedly and may have tried to cling to others out of a sense of desperation. Even if you had a romantic partner or best friend, you would never fully trust that they weren’t going to leave you alone.

Fearful (Anxious and Avoidant). If your parents were frightened or frightening, you may have learned early on that those who were supposed to have loved you hurt you. In this case, you may never have experienced someone else mirroring you accurately or seeing your perspective. You may have developed a sense of aloneness early in life that never went away even if you were able to hide from it for periods of time. In adulthood, you may have a chronic sense of loneliness that never goes away even when you are surrounded by people or have a romantic partner.

Loneliness as Emotional Memory

Sometimes emotions like loneliness are not caused by current events. Rather, things in the current environment, including people, can trigger an emotional experience that was already in you. These emotional memories would have come from childhood experiences with parents and later from friends and romantic partners. Adolescence, for example, was a confusing and lonely time for many people. Because of the confusion, strong emotions from painful social experiences may have been stored separately from the events that originally created them. When an adult event is similar enough to the original event, it may trigger the emotional experience without you recalling the original incident… So, it seems that the emotion is coming from what just happened in adulthood even if the origin was actually decades earlier.

So, if you feel lonely….

Take a look at yourself first. Is the feeling familiar? If something happened to make you feel lonely, see if you can view it as a triggering event of an emotion that already had a place in your experience. Then see if you can sit with the feeling in your body without trying to make it go away, and attach it to a memory from earlier in your life. Go back as far as you can. If you can heal that original wound or period of your life, you may find that your loneliness in adulthood becomes much less intense. (Click here for understanding inner child work and here for how to shift your emotional memories).

Increase your social support. Don’t rely on one or two people for all your social needs. Most adults will eventually get tired of this and let you down. Try to branch out and join activity-based groups, clubs, or volunteer organizations or find a local (in person!) self-help group.

See if you are protecting yourself. Sometimes when we are afraid of getting hurt or rejected, we will cut ourselves off from others before they get the chance. In this case, we may not feel rejected, but we will certainly feel isolated and alone.

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Ask for the validation you need. You aren’t responsible for other people’s actions, but don’t assume that your relationship partners realize that they are doing something to contribute to your loneliness. From their own attachment style lens, especially if they are avoidant, they might not be doing anything wrong. But you can coach them to respond to you in ways that help you feel understood, supported, and less alone.

Remember the pattern that secure parents use when their children are upset:

1. Perceive the other person’s feelings and experience.

2. Mirror their experience through your voice, facial expressions, and body language.

3. Validate their feelings and experience. This is where you verbally acknowledge that the other person has a right to their perspective and experience… without you changing it or making them wrong.

4. Hold the other person’s emotions and perspectives. This means you join them in their experience at least for a short time. Sit with them in their sadness, anger, or fear without trying to change it.

5. Upregulate. This is where you begin gently lifting the other person's emotional state. After they feel understood and validated, you can gradually introduce a different perspective or positive emotion. Notice that you are not arguing with their experience or telling them they shouldn't feel the way they do. Instead, you are helping them move toward a more hopeful emotional state while still honoring what they are feeling.

6. Recheck. Check in on how the other person is feeling and, if possible, let them know you continue to be available to them.

If you skip the steps and go directly to upregulating, you will have ignored and invalidated the other person’s perspective and feelings and tried to replace them with your own perspective and how you want them to feel. If you do this, the other person will feel:

Alone with their thoughts.

Alone with their feelings.

Alone with their struggles.

Alone... and lonely.